Hackers steal $32 million worth of Ethereum, again.

The promising cryptocurrency that’s also a platform for decentralized applications has skyrocketed in value over the last six months (though it also had a serious drop in price in the last couple of weeks). But hacker attacks and theft of ether have become commonplace, and the last one is one of the worst so far.

An unknown hacker or a group of hackers exploited a vulnerability in the way in which Parity, an Ethereum wallet, implemented multi-sig wallets, stealing some 153,000 worth of ether, which was valued around $32 million at the time of theft.

According to a security alert on the Parity blog dated July 19, the vulnerability has been fixed, but “any user with assets in a multi-sig wallet created in Parity Wallet prior to 19/07/17 23:14:56 CEST,” was vulnerable to ether theft.

The theft has indeed happened and it can be seen on Ethereum’s blockchain here. According to a post by the CEO of decentralized commerce platform Swarm City, Matthew Carano, the funds held by the company in a multi-sig wallet were completely drained on July 19, and additional funds were stolen from other companies including Edgeless Casino and Aeternity.

A multi-sig wallet is a wallet that requires more than one signature for an action to be performed on its contents. Users that had regular wallets on Parity were not in danger (incidentally, the author of this text has until recently held some ether in a Parity wallet, but not a multi-sig one).

What makes this theft particularly troublesome is that Parity is one of the most trusted wallets in the business. The company was founded by Gavin Wood, who is also a co-founder of Ethereum and has written the initial implementation of Ethereum back in 2014. Furthermore, it appears that no amount of caution on the users’ side could’ve prevented the theft.

If the creator of Solidity, Gavin Wood, cannot write a secure multisig wallet in Solidity, pretty much confirms Ethereum is hacker paradise. https://t.co/WAR3eltfWl

This isn’t even the first ether theft this week. On Tuesday, an initial coin offering (ICO) of an Ethereum-based startup called CoinDash went south as hackers managed to change the wallet address on the project’s web page, siphoning away more than $10 million worth of ether.

And in June 2016, hackers exploited a vulnerability in the code of DAO, another Ethereum-based project, stealing some 3.6 million ether, which today would be worth a whopping $742 million. To repair the damage, Ethereum’s management decided to create a hard fork in the software, undoing the theft but also splitting Ethereum into two separate cryptocoins: Ethereum and (today far less valuable) Ethereum Classic.

In a move sure to put Apple’s ongoing activities in China under a more intense international microscope, a number of foreign-made VPN software apps have been removed from China’s app store, according to a report from The New York Times.

Just one day after it was revealed that Apple had removed virtual private networking (VPN) apps from its China App Store at the behest of the government, we’ve learned that officials in Russia are cracking down on VPN services, too.